Opening this Wednesday, in limited release, is director Richard Linklater’s Me and Orson Welles. Based in real theatrical history, the film is a coming-of-age story about a teenage actor (Zac Efron) who lucks into a role in Julius Caesar as it’s being re-imagined by a brilliant, impetuous young director named Orson Welles (Christian McKay) at his newly-founded Mercury Theater in NYC, 1937. Claire Danes co-stars as Sonja Jones, the unapologetically ambitious assistant to Welles who Zac tries to go after.

While the film premiered at last year’s Toronto Film Festival, it took awhile for someone to purchase the film for domestic distribution. While a delay might be a sign of a problem, I saw Me and Orson Welles a few weeks ago and thought it was great. While all the performances are really good, Christian McKay as Orson Welles is another level. He absolutely disappears as Welles and his performance alone makes this film worth seeing. Also, this was McKay’s first movie, and when you factor that in, it makes his performance even more memorable.

To help promote the film, I recently sat down with Christian McKay and Claire Danes for separate interviews and you can watch them after the jump. They both talked about how they came to the project, making the film, and a lot more:

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